Communication and storage systems encompass several fields such as telephone, radio broadcasting, television, satellite transmission, optical communications, disc drives, tape drives and the like. In such communication systems, information may be coded to be transmitted or stored in another medium, transferred, and later decoded to reconstruct the original information. Most such systems are prone to noise and other disturbances that can cause errors to appear in the reconstructed information. In such systems, data may be transferred from one medium to another and eventually received in a usable form. Often the objective of such a system is to reproduce the original information as accurately as possible with the least distortion and fewest errors.
In a communications or storage system, signals containing information may propagate through a medium, or they may be stored on a storage medium. The signal may be received by a receiving element configured to detect the received or stored signal. In some systems, the encoded information signal is received as an analog waveform that may be processed by the data handling system to produce a decoded signal. Some communication systems are configured to convert the received signal to, for example, an electronic signal that can be conveniently processed. For example, the decoded signal may be in a digital (binary) format suitable for processing by the receiving host, which may be a computer.
Communication and storage systems may handle signals encoded with information, such as voice, video, audio, or raw data. Signals may also be encoded with meta-information. Such meta-information may include parity information, synchronization (timing) information, and other levels of information, including routing and message parameter information that an information handling system may use to process an incoming signal. The information may be received from a storage medium, such as a data storage device, or a stream of transmitted information, such as a satellite that broadcasts television signals, for example.
Prior to sending the decoded information to the host, some data handling systems may provide the detection and decoding of the information. The detection of the information is a process involving processing the signal to identify the information bits represented therein. The decoding of the information may occur after the detection process and may include the removal of meta-information or error detection and/or correction of the decoded information. Some hosts expect that the information sent by the data handling system will be in a particular sequential order, which is generally the same order in which the encoded information was received by the receiving element.